December 25, 2007

December 06, 2007

I really enjoyed this piece at the O'Reilly site by Larry Wall, creator of Perl. He is surveying the progression of scripting languages, and rightly notes that the debate whether any given language is a programming language or a scripting language is a cultural one. I found several points insightful, such as:

Text

Many of you here are Perl programmers, but some of you come from other programming tribes. And depending on your tribal history, you might think of a string as a pointer to a byte array if you're a C programmer, or as a list if you're a functional programmer, or as an object if you're a Java programmer. I view a string as a Text, with a capital T.

I read that word from a postmodern perspective. Of course, the term Postmodern is itself context-sensitive. Some folks think Postmodernism means little more than the Empowerment of the Vulgar. Some folks think the same about Perl.

But I take Postmodernism to mean that a Text, whether spoken or written, is an act of communication requiring intelligence on both ends, and sometimes in the middle too. I don't want to talk to a stupid computer language. I want my computer language to understand the strings I type.

Perl is a postmodern language, and a lot of conservative folks feel like Postmodernism is a rather liberal notion. So it's rather ironic that my views on Postmodernism were primarily informed by studying linguistics and translation as taught by missionaries, specifically, the Wycliffe Bible Translators. One of the things they hammered home is that there's really no such thing as a primitive human language. By which they mean essentially that all human languages are Turing complete.